Book Image

Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy

By : Dmitry Anoshin, Himani Rana, Ning Ma, Neil Mehta
Book Image

Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy

By: Dmitry Anoshin, Himani Rana, Ning Ma, Neil Mehta

Overview of this book

Business intelligence is becoming more important by the day, with cloud offerings and mobile devices gaining wider acceptance and achieving better market penetration. MicroStrategy Reporting Suite is an absolute leader in the BI market and offers rich capabilities from basic data visualizations to predictive analytics. It lets you various delivery methods such as the Web, desktops, and mobiles. Using real-world BI scenarios, this book helps you to implement Business Analytics solutions in big e-commerce companies. It kicks off with MicroStrategy 10 features and then covers schema design models and techniques. Building upon your existing knowledge, the book will teach you advanced techniques for building documents and dashboards. It further teaches various graphical techniques for presenting data for analysis using maps, graphs, and advanced charts. Although MicroStrategy has rich functionality, the book will show how to customize it in order to meet your business requirements. You will also become familiar with the native analytical functions that will help you to maximize the impact of BI solutions with powerful predictive analytics. Furthermore, the book will focus on MicroStrategy Mobile Analytics along with data discovery and desktop capabilities such as connecting various data sources and building interactive dashboards. The book will also uncover best practices, troubleshooting techniques for MicroStrategy system administration, and also security and authentication techniques. Lastly, you will learn to use Hadoop for MicroStrategy reporting. By the end of the book, you will become proficient in evaluating any BI software in order to choose the best one that meets all business requirements.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Building ad hoc schemas


MicroStrategy Desktop allows us to build ad hoc schemas in intuitive ways using a friendly interface. Ad hoc schemas help business users to achieve quicker values. The core of the ad hoc building process is Data Import, which has many features such as auto-detect attributes type, auto-create metrics, auto-identify data relations, and allows us to preview data. In addition, it allows us to combine data from multiple sources in a single dataset, create multi-form attributes, and create and edit relationships across attributes. Finally, it can be mapped to project attributes in order to inherit project security filters in MicroStrategy Enterprise.

We are going to work with relational databases and use the same source as we used in Chapter 2, Setting Up an Analytics Semantic Layer and Public Objects when we built schemas. There is a picture from CA ERwin Data Modeler, that displays physical data models. Using this model, we can easily identify what tables we need and what...